So we’ll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?
That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
Can you share any examples? I have yet to see an rtx enabled game that was unusually shiny. Most non RTX game already tend to have way too much specular reflection but the few RTX games I’ve seen were way better with that.
I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.
Ray tracing is about implementing light and representing its behavior. Because reflections are, of course, a huge part of that it gets a lot of attention. Ray traced reflections allow things that aren’t otherwise on screen to be reflected without resorting to other clever tricks.
But other ray traced features implement light in (my opinion) more interesting ways. Global illumination, ambient occlusion, and shadows can all be implemented via RT and because they’re not limited by screen space information can be more accurate and, thus, impressive.
Light and objects in the world look like they belong and just look “right”. The way a sliver of sunlight can subtly light a room or the way an object appears grounded with accurate shadows can make non-RT lighting look wrong.
Check out Digital Foundry’s video on Metro Exodus Enhanced and they’ll surely go into some examples here.
Wish they’d do Hal-Life 1 with ray tracing because my video card might actually be able to run that one.
There is Black Mesa if you’re looking for a Half Life 1 remake. Not sure if there is raytracing in it though.
If it did have it, it’d almost certainly be too much for my RTX 3060. Portal RTX didn’t work too well.
Quake 2 RTX can bring my 3090 to its knees. You could do HL2 but I bet it’d be about similar to Portal RTX
What? Am I missing something? Several comments here about 3000 series not being able to handle what was easy for my 2060 to handle.
Portal RTX was “easy” for your 2060? I remember having to set DLSS to ultra performance at 1080p to get it above 30fps on a 2060s.
That’s 640x360 internal render resolution. Around 1/10 pixels of 1080p
I believe its because the RTX remix games are path traced which is alot harder to do
Quake 2 doesn’t use RTX Remix. Or at least wasn’t advertised as that being the underlying tech.
Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were saying. Performance with Portal RTX Remix was significantly worse than with Quake 2 RTX.
Good news then: https://github.com/sultim-t/xash-rt/releases
Remember the Quake 2 RTX version? Remember how no one played it? It’s just, not a good look, runs slow and just isn’t needed. This is all just to make more people buy Nvidia cards.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Quake 2 RTX is my go-to recommendation if someone wants to see what raytracing is actually about. Not only are there some built in tools to fiddle with lighting but the end result makes such a huge difference that I can’t see myself playing Quake 2 again without raytracing. Out of all the RTX supported games Quake 2 was the one that blew me away the most. It makes bright areas bright and dark areas actually dark and you can see how light sources, in real time, change the look of the environment.
To be honest, the biggest takeaway of the trailer is how well the original HL2 aged.
I find it hilarious that the “RTX On” is remastered assets and the “RXT Off” is just the original game.
Id be more interested in seeing what the original assets with RTX look like.
Very wrong, without proper materials, light bounces would make no sense (if there would be even any)
Wrong, if you just ported the original HL2 materials, things might look slightly weird but light bounces will very much be present and it would still look better than the original renderer. Light bounces (for global illumination) will happen with any material parameters. HL2 materials had bump and a kind of merged reflectiveness and metalicness value already, and if you ported them over correctly things would look acceptable (but not ideal).
